Sin and Grace are both personified; and they are both conceived of as
female figures, and both as exercising dominion. They stand face to
face, and each recognises as her enemy the other. The one has
established her dominion: 'Sin _hath_ reigned.' The other is
fighting to establish hers: 'That Grace _might_ reign.' And the
struggle is going on between them, not only on the wide field of the
world; but in the narrow lists of the heart of each of us.
Sin reigns. The truths that underlie that solemn picture are plain
enough, however unwelcome they may be to some of us, and however
remote from the construction of the universe which many of us are
disposed to take.
Now, let us understand our terms. Suppose a man commits a theft. You
may describe it from three different points of view. He has thereby
broken the law of the land; and when we are thinking about that we
call it crime. He has also broken the law of 'morality,' as we call
it; and when we are looking at his deed from that point of view, we
call it vice. Is that all? He has broken something else. He has
broken the law of God; and when we look at it from that point of view
we call it sin. Now, there are a great many things which are sins
that are not crimes; and, with due limitations, I might venture to
say that there are some things which are sins that are not to be
qualified as vices. Sin implies God. The Psalmist was quite right
when he said; 'Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned'; although he
was confessing a foul injury he had done to Bathsheba, and a glaring
crime that he had committed against Uriah. It was as to God, and in
reference to Him only, that his crime and his vice darkened and
solidified into sin.
And what is it, in our actions or in ourselves considered in
reference to God, that makes our actions sins and ourselves sinners?
Remember the prodigal son. 'Father! Give me the portion of goods that
falleth to me.' There you have it all. He went away, and 'wasted his
substance in riotous living.' To claim myself for my own; to act
independently of, or contrary to, the will of God; to try to shake
myself clear of Him; to have nothing to do with Him, even though it
be by mere forgetfulness and negligence, and, in all my ways to
comport myself as if I had no relations of dependence on and
submission to him--that is sin. And there may be that oblivion or
rebellion, not only in the gross vulgar acts which the law calls
crimes, or in those which conscience declares to be vices, but also
in many things which, looked at from a lower point of view, may be
fair and pure and noble. If there is this assertion of self in them,
or oblivion of God and His will in them, I know not how we are to
escape the conclusion that even these fall under the class of sins.
For there can be no act or thought, truly worthy of a man, situated
and circumstanced as we are, which has not, for the very core and
animating motive of it, a reference to God.
Now, when I come and say, as my Bible teaches me to say, that this is
the deepest view of the state of humanity that sin reigns, I do not
wish to fall into the exaggerations by which sometimes that statement
has been darkened and discredited; but I do want to press upon you,
dear brethren, this, as a matter of _personal_ experience, that
wherever there is a heart that loves, and leaves God out, and
wherever there is a will that resolves, determines, impels to action,
and does not bow itself before Him, and wherever there are hands that
labour, or feet that run, at tasks and in paths self-chosen and
unconsecrated by reference to our Father in heaven, no matter how
great and beautiful subsidiary lustres may light up their deeds, the
very heart of them all is transgression of the law of God. For this,
and nothing else or less, is His law: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
strength, and with all thy mind.' I do not charge you with crimes.
You know how far it would be right to charge you with vices. _I_
do not charge you with anything; but I pray you to come with me and
confess: 'We all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.'
I suppose I need not dwell upon the difficulty of getting a lodgment
for this conviction in men's hearts. There is no sadder, and no more
conclusive proof, of the tremendous power of sin over us, than that
it has lulled us into unconsciousness, hard to be broken, of its own
presence and existence. You remember the old stories--I suppose there
is no truth in them, but they will do for an illustration--about some
kind of a blood-sucking animal that perched upon a sleeping man, and
with its leathern wings fanned him into deeper drowsiness whilst it
drew from him his life-blood. That is what this hideous Queen does
for men. She robes herself in a dark cloud, and sends out her behests
from obscurity. And men fancy that they are free whilst all the while
they are her servants. Oh, dear brethren! you may call this theology,
but it is a simple statement of the facts of our condition. 'Sin hath
reigned.'
And now turn to the other picture, 'Grace might reign.' Then there is
an antagonistic power that rises up to confront the widespread
dominion of this anarch of old. And this Queen comes with twenty
thousand to war against her that has but ten thousand on her side.
Again I say, let us understand our terms. I suppose, there are few of
the keywords of the New Testament which have lost more of their
radiance, like quicksilver, by exposure in the air during the
centuries than that great word Grace, which is always on the lips of
this Apostle, and to him had music in its sound, and which to us is a
piece of dead doctrine, associated with certain high Calvinistic
theories which we enlightened people have long ago grown beyond, and
got rid of. Perhaps Paul was more right than we when his heart leaped
up within him at the very thought of all which he saw to lie
palpitating and throbbing with eager desire to bless men, in that
great word. What does he mean by it? Let me put it into the shortest
possible terms. This antagonist Queen is nothing but the love of God
raying out for ever to us inferior creatures, who, by reason of our
sinfulness, have deserved something widely different. Sin stands
there, a hideous hag, though a queen; Grace stands here, 'in all her
gestures dignity and love,' fair and self-communicative, though a
sovereign. The love of God in exercise to sinful men: that is what
the New Testament means by grace. And is it not a great thought?
Notice, for further elucidation of the Apostle's conception, how he
sacrifices the verbal correctness of his antithesis in order to get
to the real opposition. What is the opposite of Sin? Righteousness.
Why does he not say, then, that 'as Sin hath reigned unto death, even
so might Righteousness reign unto life'? Why? Because it is not man,
or anything in man, that can be the true antagonist of, and victor
over, the regnant Sin of humanity; but God Himself comes into the
field, and only He is the foe that Sin dreads. That is to say, the
only hope for a sin-tyrannised world is in the out-throb of the love
of the great heart of God. For, notice the weapon with which He
fights man's transgression, if I may vary the figure for a moment. It
is only subordinately punishment, or law, or threatening, or the
revelation of the wickedness of the transgression. All these have
their places, but they are secondary places. The thing that will
conquer a world's wickedness is nothing else but the manifested love
of God. Only the patient shining down of the sun will ever melt the
icebergs that float in all our hearts. And wonderful and blessed it
is to think that, in whatsoever aspects man's sin may have been an
interruption and a contradiction of the divine purpose, out of the
evil has come a good; that the more obdurate and universal the
rebellion, the more has it evoked a deeper and more wondrous
tenderness. The blacker the thundercloud, the brighter glows the
rainbow that is flung across it. So these two front each other, the
one settled in her established throne--
'Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell--'
the other coming on her adventurous errand to conquer the world to
herself, and to banish the foul tyranny under which men groan. 'Sin
hath reigned.' Grace is on her way to her dominion.